Monday, October 24, 2011

When this “Sopranos” actor got into a jam, he didn’t call Tony -- he went straight to the Colombos.
Federico Castelluccio, a k a imported-from-Italy mob enforcer Furio Giunta on the HBO series “The Sopranos,” turned to the real crime family’s acting street boss to help him recoup his investment in a failed New Jersey restaurant -- run by none other than the first cousin of on-screen mafioso Joe Pesci, sources told The Post.
The friendship between Castelluccio, an actor and respected painter, and reputed Colombo boss Andrew “Andy Mush” Russo, a self-professed art lover, began years earlier. They met while Russo was doing time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, Orange County, and the actor had come to visit an inmate.

‘MOB’ SCENE: Federico Castelluccio (above), who played Furio Giunta on “The Sopranos,” was involved in a failed New Jersey restaurant with Joe Pesci’s cousin Gino Pesci. The fiasco drove him to seek money from Andrew Russo, sources say.

Then, a few years ago, Castelluccio -- a native of Italy who grew up in Paterson -- invested $50,000 in a plan to open a tony restaurant.
The moving force behind the project was Gino Pesci, a restaurateur and the cousin of “GoodFellas’’ actor Joe Pesci.
“It was just an awesome concept,” Gino Pesci told The Post of his “fast-casual” eatery in New Brunswick.
But the restaurant, Attilio’s Pasta Kitchen, which opened in 2002, failed and folded two years later.
After the business failure, Pesci acknowledged that he and Castelluccio “drifted apart.”
“Federico is an incredible artist, but he’s not a businessman. Maybe that’s why he took it harder than the rest,” Pesci said.
Their distance may have widened when Pesci went on a spending spree after the restaurant was shuttered, records show.
In 2006 and 2007, he paid $35,000 to buy 18 acres in the Adirondacks, records show.
Pesci then spent thousands more building a cabin, garage and shed amid the pine trees there.
In 2008, more large expenditures followed. He moved his other surviving restaurant into a different building in North Jersey, gutted it and undertook a massive renovation, records show.
Castelluccio was furious that the restaurateur appeared to be living the good life when he felt that Pesci still owed him $50,000 for the failed eatery investment, several sources told The Post.
That’s when he turned to the Colombo crime family to help him get the money back, the sources said.
Russo and another high-level Colombo mobster allegedly plotted last fall how to collect the actor’s money from Pesci, sources said. But before they could put a plan in motion, they were busted by FBI agents in a mass sweep involving that alleged plot and other crimes in January.
Castelluccio showed up at Russo’s bail hearing in Brooklyn.
At the time, he told The Post, “I’m just here to show support for a friend.”
Castelluccio declined to be interviewed for this article, only releasing a carefully worded statement saying:
“Gino Pesci has never owed me any money, and therefore, it is hard to imagine why anyone would even think about asking him for anything on my behalf. It never happened. And anyone who claims that it did happen is simply not telling the truth.”
Brooklyn federal prosecutors indicted Andrew Russo and the other Colombo mobster on charges of conspiring to commit extortion for the alleged plot against Pesci, according to court documents and several sources.
Castelluccio has not been accused of wrongdoing.
Russo is currently in a federal detention center awaiting trial. His lawyer, George Galgano, flatly denied that his client was involved in a plot to shake down Pesci.
Joe Pesci -- whom Gino said he sees about once a year -- did not return a call for comment.